You can sometimes play Windows Media movies even if you do not have the correct codec but you must have the codec that was used to create the movie to convert it. Below are Windows Media 9 codec packs for Media Player 7 through 10:

• Windows XP

• Windows 98

• Windows ME

• Windows 2000

The codec pack for Windows Media Player 6.4 is below:

Windows Media 9 Codecs for 6.4

When converting from WMV to MPEG or AVI, Fx MPEG Writer is slow in reading the WMV files and displaying a preview because of the way that Microsoft creates the file header. Actual conversion is only slightly slower.

Some Windows Media files are copy protected and cannot be converted.

Windows Media Files created with the early release of Windows Movie Maker are often buggy. If you load a one hour movie in Fx MPEG Writer but the file information shows that play time is shorter the source file has a corrupt of missing index and Fx MPEG Writer will only convert the file from the start to the bad index. The easiest way to fix such files is to re-encode using Microsoft's Windows Media Encoder:

Media Encoder 9

For Fx MPEG Writer conversion procedures see Getting Started.